2 months ago

2 months ago

2 months ago

Casual ACC fans know the stars. But on any successful basketball team, there is always at least one unheralded player who helps his team by contributing in any number of different ways. Perhaps a scorer who brings energy to a second unit; a defensive stopper who anchors the back line of the defense; or a newcomer claiming a role for the future. Who are those guys in the ACC this season? We’re glad you asked.

Boston College: Connar Tava. Tava had a terrific junior year in 2014-15 at Western Michigan when he averaged 12.3 points per game and shot 52.1 percent from the field. After suffering a season-ending foot injury early last year, he redshirted and transferred to Boston College in the offseason..

Clemson: Marcquise Reed. When you have a player as talented as potential All-American Jaron Blossomgame, he is going to attract a lot of attention from opposing defenses. The best way to take advantage of that? Surround him with players who can knock down the three-point shot. Reed, a transfer from Robert Morris hit 41.3 percent of his shots from long distance last season.

Duke: Matt Jones. It’s tough to make a case for a Duke player being relatively unknown, but Jones is the best option here. He averaged 10.4 points per game for the Blue Devils last season, but he won’t be asked to score nearly as much this year. Rather, what he will be asked to do is guard the opponents’ best perimeter players, especially during the home stretch of tight games. He is a terrific on-ball defender and versatile enough to adequately defend both guards and wings.

We are continuing our ACC Must-Follow List for the year with Georgia Tech, Louisville, Miami, and North Carolina in this post. If there are any other Twitter accounts that you think should be included, send us a tweet @rtcACC or leave a message in the comments section below.

This team preview is part of the RTC ACC microsite’s preseason coverage.

Burning Question: Will members of Louisville’s talented sophomore class make the leap to stardom?

Outside of some of the recent Kentucky and Duke squads that featured freshman superstars, most preseason top-20 teams return at least one double-figure scorer. That is not the case with this year’s Louisville squad — ranked #13 in the preseason AP poll and #14 in the USA Today/Coaches Poll — with Quentin Snider at 9.4 PPG representing the highest returning scoring average. The expectation underlying the Cardinals’ lofty rankings is that head coach Rick Pitino will see a leap in production from a sophomore class that oozes NBA potential. The player Pitino expects to reach stardom soonest is shooting guard Donovan Mitchell, whose high-flying style of play produced some of the best dunks seen anywhere in college basketball a season ago. If the sophomore wants to become a complete player, he must improve a three-point stroke that connected on only 25 percent of his 72 three-point attempts last year.

Donovan Mitchell hopes to show he can be more than just a dunking machine as a sophomore.

Mitchell can look to former Louisville backcourt stars Russ Smith and Terry Rozier as examples of shooting guards who blossomed under Pitino. Despite an injury-plagued first campaign, wing Deng Adel is another sophomore who has the attention of NBA scouts. He showed flashes of his vast potential late in the year, starting the last five games. The third member of the class is lanky forward Raymond Spalding, who, according to Pitino, “probably has the most pro potential on the team.” Blessed with a 7’4″ wingspan, Spalding is one of the longest and most versatile defenders in college basketball. But it’s not just the youngsters in the program that have Louisville fans excited. Senior Mangok Mathiang broke a bone in his foot last December and never returned, but he should be fully healthy now. With Chinanu Onuaku gone to the NBA, it’s Mathiang’s turn to man the post by blocking shots, snagging boards, and finishing at the rim. Others available in the Cardinals’ deep frontcourt are juniors Jaylen Johnson, Anas Mahmoud and Matz Stockman. After an offseason of hard work, Pitino is calling Johnson “the most improved player on this team.” Mahmoud and Stockman give Louisville a pair of experienced seven-footers to back up Mathiang. Read the rest of this entry »

Compared with just a short decade ago, many more student-athletes are going the transfer route. When we combine that trend with the 60-75 underclassmen who turn professional each spring, the aggregate result is that roster turnover is at an all-time high. When it comes to media coverage of newcomers, the focus tends to primarily be on freshmen. So in order to get familiar with the transfers entering the ACC this season, we have provided the list below that breaks non-freshmen newcomers to the league into four groupings (traditional transfers; graduate transfers; JuCo transfers; sitting out this year). Players within each category are ordered according to the anticipated impact that they will have this season.

This group represents what we know as the traditional transfers — those who are moving from one four-year school to another and, as a result, were forced to sit out last season. Virginia’s Austin Nichols is expected to step in as Anthony Gill’s immediate replacement in the post. He should fit right in with Tony Bennett’s scheme defensively and will provide additional rim protection after proving to be an elite shot-blocker in his two years at Memphis. The word out of Raleigh is that NC State’s Torin Dorn has looked great in preseason workouts and may be ready to start for the Wolfpack. Clemson figures to get major production from at least two of its transfers — Marquise Reed was a big-time scorer on an NCAA Tournament team in 2014-15 (Robert Morris) and Elijah Thomas was a top-50 type recruit coming into college.

Most people rebalance their portfolios at the end of the year, but for some reason Seth Davis decided to file his annual stock report at the start of 2016 (maybe his CPA doesn’t believe in tax-loss harvesting). In any event, it is a good refresher if you haven’t been focused on college basketball with the college football season mercifully ending. We agree with most of Seth’s buy, sell, or hold recommendations although buying the #1 team in this scenario seems akin to buying a stock with a ridiculous P/E ratio.

Indiana will be without sophomore guard James Blackmon Jr. for the rest of the season after he underwent season-ending surgery on his right knee yesterday. Blackmon, who was averaging 15.8 points and 4.2 rebounds per game this season (similar to the 15.7 and 5.3 he averaged last year) had surgery on his left knee over the summer and appeared to recover. It is unclear if this injury was related to him overcompensating with the other leg or just a coincidence. In any event, the Hoosiers will have to find a way to make up for the lost offense although as we have seen their problems are usually on the other side of the ball. So far they are off to a good start with their win over Wisconsin last night.

One of the bigger stories of this season that has flown under the radar is the success of Southern Methodist as the Mustangs have started the season 13-0, but are banned from participating in the postseason. That ban is in large part due to issues around the recruitment of Keith Frazier, who had been averaging 11.9 points per game, but decided to leave the program because he feels that he is being blamed for the postseason ban. Given Brown’s history it is an amusing twist that the last stop of his coaching career will end with a player leaving him after the recruitment of that player led to the third time that a program run by Brown has been sanctioned by the NCAA.

Speaking of sanctions, it appears that San Diego Statewill not face any from the NCAA for allegations that they provided recruits with improper benefits. According to the original reports these could have potentially resulted in Level 1 violations. The full extent of the reported violations never came out publicly (possibly because there wasn’t enough evidence to substantiate them), but given Steve Fischer’s history of being fired at Michigan in the wake of the Ed Martin scandal we can understand if San Diego State fans and the administration are feeling a sense of relief.

It might seem early to be talking about impact transfers, but Louisville appears to have landed one for next season in Penn guard Tony Hicks, who led the Quakers in scoring the past two seasons. Hicks is sitting out this season and will graduate in May making him eligible to play next season for Louisville as a graduate transfer. We aren’t ready to start thinking of Louisville as another version of Iowa State, but Hicks will be the third significant transfer to Louisville in the past two seasons with Damion Lee (17.6 points and 4 rebounds per game) and Trey Lewis (14.3 points and 2.4 assists per game) leading them this year.

Michael James is the RTC correspondent for the Ivy League. You can also find his musings on Twitter at @mrjames2006 and @ivybball.

Looking Back

The 14-Game Tournament — College basketball’s most unique conference schedule gets underway in earnest this weekend, as the eight members of the Ivy League begin six weeks of Friday/Saturday back-to-back games for the right to represent the league in the NCAA Tournament. No conference tournament, no second chances. The only rare appearances for the league during Championship Week occur when the regular season title is shared, in which case no tiebreakers are applied and the two or more teams proceed directly to a neutral site playoff. The last one of those happened following the 2011 season, when a Douglas Davis jumper at the buzzer sent Princeton past Harvard into the NCAA Tournament. Currently, the odds of playoff this season sit around 20 percent and would most likely be a repeat of that 2011 duel.

Odds Aren’t — The last travel partner weekend was supposed to be a snoozer as each of the three contests had favorites of between 5.5 and 16.5 points. No one told the teams involved, apparently, as two of the three contests went into overtime and another wasn’t decided until a missed three at the buzzer. The favorites are still 5-2 in the early going, meaning that the race has gone pretty much to plan thus far. If the results from last weekend are any indication, however, the next six weekends should provide plenty of surprising moments while the league likely ends up either of the expected favorites, Harvard or Princeton, taking home the title.

Princeton(8-7, 1-0 Ivy) – Two massively important records for Tigers fans to keep in mind are 2-5 and 6-2. Those are Princeton’s marks when Ian Hummer uses over and under 35 percent of his team’s possessions, respectively. Hummer is everywhere on the offensive end, taking tons of shots, drawing many fouls and even leading the entire Ivy League in assist rate. As a whole, though, the Tigers are far more effective when the 6’7″ senior is doing a lot, but not too much. The new, improved Princeton squad of the last month has thrived on ball movement to find any of the myriad three-point shooters that can knock down open looks. When the offense is running smoothly and efficiently, it becomes very difficult for one player to use more than a third of the team’s possessions, which likely means that Princeton’s title hopes rest on Hummer doing less, not more. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael James is the RTC correspondent for the Ivy League. You can also find his musings on Twitter at @mrjames2006 and @ivybball.

Top Storylines

Pencil, Not Ink:In the Ivy Summer School piece, one of the top storylines was devoted to the important roster changes that had occurred since the final whistle blew in March. Looking back, that blurb was merely foreshadowing. In early September, the Harvard cheating scandal broke, and shortly after, four names dropped off the Crimson’s published roster, including All-Ivy seniors Brandyn Curry and Kyle Casey. Around the same time, forward Dockery Walker disappeared from the Brown roster, as he will miss the season with a knee injury – a huge blow considering All-Ivy caliber forward Andrew McCarthy already left the team prior to what would have been his senior season. Princeton’s already threadbare backcourt took a hit when Jimmy Sherburne decided to take the season off to recover from a shoulder injury. Dartmouth, a team that needs as much talent as it can find, dropped its third-leading scorer R.J. Griffin from its roster before what would have been his senior season. Finally, Meiko Lyles fell off the Columbia roster earlier this month then returned to it a few days later, an important development after Noruwa Agho decided not to use his fifth year of eligibility to return to the squad for the upcoming season. Final rosters have been posted for a while now, but thus far, the term “final” has merely been a suggestion.

Curry & Casey Became Household Names For the Wrong Reasons This Fall

GOV 1310: Introduction To Chaos: The novelty of seeing Ivy basketball plastered all over popular publications and seeing air time on SportsCenter has long since passed, as the 2010 Cornell squad, Tommy Amaker-led Harvard teams and Linsanity have afforded the league publicity far beyond what a normal one-bid conference could expect. For the first time since the initial media explosion, though, the breaking story would hardly paint Harvard or the Ivy League in a positive light. Roughly 125 students were being investigated for cheating on a take-home exam in Government 1310: Introduction to Congress. Among the accused were a few Harvard basketball players, including two of the league’s best – Curry and Casey. While the story elicited editorial commentary of both a supportive and condemning nature, from a basketball perspective, the subsequent withdrawals of both student-athletes turned the Ivy race upside down. Curry was the lone returning point guard on the team, and Casey’s presence in the frontcourt was supposed to ease the pain of losing former Ivy Player of the Year Keith Wright. Now, with 10 freshmen and sophomores and just five juniors and seniors combined, the Crimson has become one of the league’s least experienced squads.

Live Streaming, But On Cable: For the first time since the Ivy deal with YES expired after the 2007-08 season, the league has a national media partner for men’s basketball. In renewing its Ivy football rights this past spring, NBC Sports Network also agreed to pick up as many as 10 basketball games per year, putting the league in almost 80 million homes nationally. In its inaugural season, the channel formerly known as Versus nabbed the maximum number of allotted games with three non-conference contests and seven Ivy showdowns. Including the Harvard-Yale game on February 23, which NBC sublicensed to CBS Sports Network, the package will provide the league with one game on national television every week but one from December 28 to the end of the season. Ivy squads are also scheduled to appear on the ESPN family of networks 11 times (five of those on ESPN3), the Pac-12 network twice and the Big Ten Network and Fox Sports Net once each.